NBC is thisclose to being put out of our misery.

An affiliate decides to air a 21-year-old Matlock movie instead of the network’s Thursday night programming.

You know NBC’s ratings are really bad when…

Matlock’s ratings are not much different than the regular shows.
Last night, Cleveland’s WKYC-TV opted to run a 1992 two-hour Matlock movie at 9 p.m. instead of NBC’s scheduled lineup. The rest of the country saw an Office repeat, a new episode of struggling White House sitcom 1600 Penn and a Law & Order: SVU repeat.

How did this rebellious experiment turn out? The metered-market ratings show Matlock actually outperformed 1600 Penn’s recent delivery in the Cleveland market, and was about on par with The Office repeat’s national performance. During the 10 p.m. hour, however, the SVU repeat was clearly more popular.

I think an old Slate article pointed out that women, for some reason, can watch Law & Order repeats as often as men watch Midnight Run or Jaws. Not sure why that is.

NBC claimed this is not at all unusual. I think Nolte will enjoy that — “BenSmithing” is a general PR response to embarrassing news. Just claim “This happens all the time” and “There’s nothing to see here folks, MoveOn.org.”